Mortal Danger (5 page)

Early on, she was a little surprised to find that John drank more than she had realized. However, it didn’t seem to be a problem, since they were both extremely health oriented and she didn’t think John would do anything in enough excess to damage his body. He liked wine, but most Californians did.

Sometimes she saw bursts of inexplicable fury in John, not unlike his anger over his friend taking his parking space in her driveway. Kate blamed it on the times he’d had too much to drink; he attributed it to low blood sugar, fatigue, or some other problem that was out of his control. Once, when they still lived in San Diego, John took a hammer and smashed a ring he’d given her to bits. He put holes in the walls with his feet and his fists. And he was full of road rage, too, furious if another driver cut him off.

But his tantrums faded away as quickly as they came.

When the Brandens’ legal separation was a fait accompli, John moved in with Kate. Neither of them was anxious to get married, but they did foresee a bright future as friends, lovers, and partners. When his divorce was final, it seemed that they had smooth sailing ahead, and they really were going to make it together.

With the divorce, John’s ex-wife and his younger daughter no longer worked at the Bayview Medical Center. His older daughter, Tamara, had taken over the clinic. Even though the Lakhvirs’ lawsuit was settled, John didn’t go back.

Somehow, they had accomplished an almost tranquil transition, although John was insistent that he didn’t want to stay in his present situation; he had too many plans, and he wanted to travel with Kate, to enjoy life a little now that they were both in their forties.

She was very happy living with him, working beside
him. There was a kind of magic in John that inspired other people, allowing them to see possibilities they hadn’t considered. As much as they had talked through long evenings, there was so much about him that she didn’t know. Although there were things in his past that he didn’t want to elaborate on, he occasionally gave her short scenarios about his years as a boy and younger man. He seemed to have worked and studied very hard to become the man she knew now.

Kate knew that John’s father, for whom John was named, had died in 1986, but he didn’t care to speak about him much. A pall seemed to descend over John whenever she asked about his father, so she didn’t press him. His mother was elderly and ill, and lived close by in the San Diego area. She had lived with John and Sue, but of course they couldn’t expect John’s ex-wife to be responsible for taking care of his mother any longer.

Kate liked John’s mother, and often brought her small gifts she picked up in the cities she flew to. Sometimes Kate brought to work the cozy slippers that the older woman had crocheted, which she would sell to the other flight attendants. That tickled John’s mother, and she accepted Kate as a member of her family.

John was a devoted son and very considerate of his mother, who had a series of heart attacks. He visited her in her assisted-living apartment often, and he and Kate frequently took her out to dinner.

When John’s mother died of her final heart attack in 1992, she left him a half million dollars in her will. John’s sister, Marilyn*, his only sibling, lived in the Point Loma area of San Diego. Kate had never met her—John and she
had been estranged for years. Kate wasn’t sure why, but John sometimes said she had betrayed him, turning him in to “some” authorities (Kate was never sure if it was the police or someone else) when he and his family had lived with Marilyn and her husband after they’d left Florida. He also said she and her girlfriends had humiliated him when he was only a boy, making him take his clothes off, tying him up, and laughing at him.

But that was such a long time ago, and Kate suspected he might be confused about things that had happened when he was a child.

With his inheritance from his mother, John finally had the freedom to travel and plan what he would do for the rest of his life. He’d closed down his practice at Bayview in 1993, Tamara had set up her own business, and John decided not to start another California clinic.

He and Kate embarked on a long trip. They drove to Arizona to see her father. Then they went wherever the wind took them, heading up the Oregon coast and north along the Washington shoreline on the Pacific Ocean. In some places, now, the beaches became less welcoming and somehow darker and craggier. Nevertheless, the two lovers explored some of the tiny islands off the northwest Washington coast. Both of them loved the sea, and they were sure that wherever they settled down, it would be somewhere near the coast.

It was a carefree journey; they didn’t have to be any special place at any given time, and they were together, finally without problems or hopes that seemed impossible to achieve.

Listening to John expound on his concepts and his solu
tions to any challenge was enthralling for Kate. The temper tantrums she had sometimes seen in him were easy to bury in her memory. She knew he was a good man and he had been through a lot in the past few years. With the pressure off him, she believed the angry scenes would diminish. And they did—for a while.

Kate was thankful that she had waited until she was almost forty to find the companion and lover who was well-nigh perfect for her, and she hoped she was the same for him. She wasn’t naïve enough to think they wouldn’t have some detours and disappointments along the way, but she didn’t worry about them.

Together, they could take on the world.

Occasionally, Kate came
across photographs of John in which he didn’t look at all like the confident and charismatic doctor she had first been so attracted to. He was nothing like the man in the photographs, who, with hunched shoulders, appeared to shrink into himself, that almost timid man who ducked his head in a way that diminished his image. John preferred not to have his picture taken, but he occasionally obliged when his photograph was needed for a business brochure, or when she begged him to pose.

Now that they were together all the time, she realized even more that there were basic things she didn’t know about John. She knew he’d grown up on Long Island, and that he’d lived in Florida in the years before he’d moved to San Diego, but the details were murky, and there were many almost secret aspects of his life before California. She knew his birthday was February 24, 1945, which made him a Pisces, a Pisces on the cusp of Aquarius. Either zodiac sign fit him in many ways.

John continued his education in 1994 and earned another diploma from Clayton College in Birmingham, Ala
bama. The document read “The Clayton School of Natural Healing, in Recognition of the Successful Completion of the Requisite Course of Study, Has Confirmed Upon John W. Branden the Degree of Doctor of Naturopathy With All the Rights and Privileges Thereto Pertaining.”

Clayton wasn’t a typical college; it had no sprawling campus where students attended classes. Indeed, it had been in existence for little more than a decade. There were no classes as such—it was a “distance-learning” institution that allowed students to take classes at their own pace online or through the mail. The actual physical “college” was a small building in Birmingham. Somewhat ironically, Alabama statutes banned distance-learning institutions for its residents, so all of Clayton’s students came from out of state.

John spoke of how he’d learned a great deal about his chosen field at Clayton, and he would suggest later that it might be good for Kate to take some courses from the Alabama college, too. She agreed that she would do so if he thought it would make her more valuable in furthering their future plans.

Kate, too, became a naturopathic doctor with a degree from Clayton and a diploma that was identical to John’s. Added to her bachelor’s degree and with years of personal study on nutrition, she had far more formal education than he did, yet he never acknowledged that. She saw, however, that John did indeed have an encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition, and quite probably knew more than she did.

Slowly, as John began to trust her more, Kate learned
more about John’s boyhood in Long Island and his family. His father had been a wealthy real estate investor in Long Island, taking advantage of the housing boom that followed the Second World War. Their family name had originally been Brandenburg, after the city in Germany, but John’s grandfather changed it when he came to America. John’s father was mostly absent from their Long Island home.

“I only saw him on weekends,” John confided. “He was always gone, making deals.”

She could see that this lack of interest on his father’s part hurt John; he often commented that he’d never really had a father. He grew up in a mostly female family with his mother and sister, and during those sporadic times when his father was home, he was a demanding parent who apparently expected more of his son than John could deliver. The bar was always held too high for him to reach; it probably would have been for any male child. John also came to resent his father because he interrupted his time with his mother.

The family was wealthy; it wasn’t that the elder Branden didn’t provide well for them, at least financially. As their fortunes grew, they spent half of each year in Florida, where real estate continued to sell briskly. John’s father was a tall, well-built man who dwarfed his son in size. He apparently dwarfed John with his personality, too. The skinny boy would never reach his father’s height, or compete favorably with his business acumen. He often felt like a failure, but he also privately thought that his father was a failure as a parent. Although he knew he had a biological father, he would never feel he had a “real” father. He had
only a man who came home when he had nothing better to do.

John told Kate proudly that he started his own business when he was a teenager, albeit on a much smaller scale than his father’s sweeping real estate deals—he mowed lawns. It wasn’t a job with much prestige, but he did it remarkably well. Even then, he was a perfectionist, and he bragged to Kate years later that many of his customers assumed he was a landscape architect. For the first time in his life, he was a success at something. By the time he was in his late teens, he was earning far more than most young men did cutting grass or doing other jobs. But he got only grudging respect from his father, who saw no future in his son’s mowing lawns, even if John had made an art of it.

John graduated from high school on Long Island and said he started college in Florida at the University of South Florida in Tampa–St. Petersburg, or it could have been at a newer campus near Miami. He was vague about that. Kate wasn’t sure how long he attended USF or if he graduated, but she assumed that he had. He told her he hadn’t joined the Peace Corps, as many graduates were doing in that era, but he said he’d been active in Head Start programs both in New Hampshire and in Florida.

After college, John entered a fifteen-year period in his life when it was difficult to trace exactly where he was or what jobs he might have held. Kate knew that John married Sue when they were both very young—she was in her teens and he was in his early twenties—but he glossed over many other aspects of his life in Florida when Kate questioned him about them. He and Sue had their two daughters, and for a time John was working at a job that he found
stultifying. He was a tax assessor for the county, and he sometimes dabbled in politics on a very low level.

Years later, when Kate did her best to learn everything about John that she could—especially in the Florida years—that job as an assessor was one of the few facts she could verify; she located fingerprints in the county assessor’s office employee records that matched John’s.

But he had another life, too. Because he always felt he had no father, he was probably vulnerable to some of the charismatic movers and shakers he met in Florida. John was searching for someone to emulate and follow, and there were many candidates for that in the sixties and seventies. It was the Age of Aquarius in the sixties, and America abounded with gurus, messiahs, and even cult leaders of so many new movements that it was hard to keep track of them.

Timothy Leary was espousing LSD “trips” in California, young people flocked to communes, cults were springing up all over, and even the Beatles were making soul-searching visits in 1968 to practice transcendental meditation with their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Two of the outstanding purveyors of far-out self-help were Werner Erhard (born Jack Rosenberg in 1935) and Bill Thaw, both the same age. Erhard and Thaw grew up together in Philadelphia and were mightily impressed with A. J. Silva of Silva Mind Control. According to him, Erhard had a sudden moment of revelation while he was driving along a California beach road. It became the basis for his movement, which swept America: Erhard Seminars Training, known as est. Bill Thaw jumped on board enthusiastically.

Erhard’s program basically held that everyone is responsible for what happens to them, and it urged followers to become aware of what should be obvious. They simply had to “get it.” The simplicity of it all, Erhard promised, would “blow their minds.” In no time, est became immensely popular, as its followers proclaimed they “got it,” even though many of them didn’t.

The program’s training sessions cost $250 a person, and there were waiting lists for trainee classes that usually numbered 250 people. The take for Erhard and his organization was $60,000 a class. This was no small sum in the seventies. The classes were not fun: they were marathon sessions with no amenities and virtually no creature comforts. Attendees were not allowed to eat, smoke, read, take notes, chew gum, or even go to the restroom during their sessions. Those first seven-hour classes were torture for those with weak bladders, so Erhard eventually modified the bathroom breaks and permitted them every four hours.

For a time, the est movement was a huge success, drawing both celebrities and average people who expected to change their lives overnight—or, rather, over two weekends.

It wasn’t Werner Erhard, however, that John Branden chose to follow; instead, it was a man who was originally close to Erhard: Bill Thaw. John would often refer to Thaw as “the father I never had,” or, more grandly, he would say, “Bill Thaw was my god.”

When Werner Erhard moved headquarters to San Francisco, he and Thaw split up. Thaw spearheaded the “psi experience,” a very general term for paranormal communication occuring during dreams, or through psychic connec
tions between people when no words are spoken. Thaw found that most humans are fascinated with messages from “beyond,” psychic foreshadowing of things yet to come, and communication that cannot be easily explained.

One of Thaw’s early disciples still recalls him with the kind of wonder only associated with slavishly devoted groupies.

How much of it is true is anyone’s guess, but Bill Thaw was allegedly a quarterback alongside Jim Brown for the Cleveland Browns in the late fifties or early sixties, then worked for the fledgling Dairy Queen chain and made a million dollars. It’s said he went to Rome and gambled much of it away. He was reportedly a very handsome, well-muscled man who was a “great dresser” and wore expensive suits. Women were fascinated with Bill Thaw, and he responded. His wife divorced him because she could no longer put up with his affairs.

According to his former follower, Bill Thaw worked at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami from 1976 until the early eighties as a psychotherapist.

John Branden, the teenager who mowed lawns, the young father who worked for the tax assessor’s office, and the man who sought status in local politics, learned much from Bill Thaw and tried to emulate him.

Kate Jewell would always feel that Thaw was the person who inspired John to become the charismatic doctor with scores of grateful patients, and the would-be entrepreneur whose goal was to make a fortune and be widely admired. Perhaps he was. And, quite likely, Thaw taught John Branden shortcuts and even con games that would pave the way for who he was to become.

Who Bill Thaw really was is perhaps more puzzling than who John Branden was, and the details of Branden’s connection to Thaw are clouded. Thaw was about ten years older than the young man who saw him as a mentor, and at that point he was far more charismatic than John Branden. Bill Thaw was an enigma, the kind of person whose secrets probably followed him to the grave.

William Michael Thaw, aka Michael William Thaw, was born in 1933, and he was probably the consummate con man. He was an accomplished smooth talker and snake-oil salesman extraordinaire. He could convince almost anyone of almost anything.

In May 1962, when John Branden was still a teenager and years away from meeting Bill Thaw, Thaw was hired by a company called Micronics Corporation of America, with headquarters in Philadelphia. The company made miniature tools for the burgeoning electronics industry, and Thaw was hired to find distributors for these products. He impressed the officers at Micronics, and they agreed when he suggested that he set up his center of operations in Hampton, Virginia.

In his late twenties, Bill Thaw set out with enthusiasm. He began by taking out an ad in the
Newport News Daily Press,
where he offered franchises for Micronics.

A Hampton man named Leon Felcher* contacted Thaw. After he checked out the Philadelphia corporation, Felcher gave Bill Thaw a check for $5,000, made out to the Micronics Corporation of America. Thaw shook his hand and gave Felcher a contract as a “master distributor” for that firm. Smiling, he explained that the check would, of course, be held in escrow to guarantee payment for the tools to be delivered.

Later, Bill Thaw offered Felcher an option besides simply delivering tools and catalogs—he suggested that Felcher join with him and form a Virginia corporation that would be completely independent of the Philadelphia firm. Felcher agreed, and Thaw obtained a charter from the Virginia Corporation Commission for the new company, to be known as American Minitronics Corporation, naming Leon Felcher president and Thaw secretary-treasurer and responsible agent. When that switch was accomplished so easily, Bill Thaw told Felcher that their Virginia corporation could also be awarded the Micronics sales franchise for the entire southeastern territory, from Maryland to Florida. That would mean commissions from all the sales made by distributors in that area.

Leon Felcher wasn’t eager to come up with another $5,000, but both Thaw and a man he introduced as his business associate—Donald Hassel—reassured him that this would be a no-fail investment. Somewhat reluctantly, Felcher wrote another $5,000 check to the Philadelphia corporation—for which Thaw had originally worked.

Felcher was right to hesitate. The company that had hired Thaw would never see either check. Bill Thaw had established a bank account with the real company’s name, but he’d added “of Hampton, Virginia,” opening it with $400 of his own money. Three days after he got Felcher’s first check, he put $3,500 in this account and kept $1,500 in cash. None of it, of course, went to the legitimate Philadelphia firm. Within ten days, Thaw and Hassel had drained the account to its last dollar to pay for their motel bills, apartment rent, and other bills unrelated to either the Minitronics corporation or the Philadelphia Micronics company.

Bill Thaw and Donald Hassel expanded their nets. They took out more advertisements in newspapers in the Southeast, extolling the tremendous business potential in miniature tools. “Qualified applicants” who made a $5,000 deposit were guaranteed a place in their corporation and were directed to communicate with Leon Felcher, president of Virginia Minitronics in Hampton.